Word of the year

Johnson: And the winner for 2013 is...

THE year’s end has come. As the hangover from January 1st recedes, it is time to work off another kind of hangover: a look back at the wonderful, weird and terrible things the English language did in 2013. At the end of the year, various dictionary-publishers, language societies and other assorted word-nerds published their “words of the year”. With what result?

Different outfits chose their words in different ways. Merriam-Webster, a dictionary-maker, chose the word that saw the biggest spike in online lookups. Unfortunately, that led to the boring triumph of “science”, which had a 176% jump. Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski gamely tried to explain our fascination with the meaning of “science”:

It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition. A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about 'phony' science, or whether science held all the answers.

All true, but does any of this particularly scream “2013”?

The Oxford Dictionaries, a division of Oxford University Press, nailed the spirit of 2013 a little better by choosing “selfie”. For those who avoided the internet for all of 2013 (only finally giving in to read this column), a selfie is

a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website

That’s more like it. Although not brand new in 2013—its first known use was in Australia in 2002—the “selfie” has risen vertiginously with ubiquitous cameras, wireless internet and social media. It got a big boost in late 2013 when Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s prime minister, snapped a quick one with herself, Barack Obama and David Cameron at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Ben Zimmer, the head of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, tips “selfie” as a strong runner when the ADS votes on its own Word of the Year on January 3rd.

Unlike some Words of the Year (ADS’s "chad" [2001] and "metrosexual" [2003]), "selfie" seems likely to survive as more than just an anachronistic curiosity. So by traditional criteria, Johnson can (with an appropriately curmudgeonly sigh) endorse "selfie" too, a perfectly self-directed word for a self-obsessed age. (That endorsement, however, does not extend to hopeless and obnoxious spinoffs like belfie, shelfie, drelfie, lelfie and others, which are about as likely to survive as "Jelfie", a word I just coined meaning “a selfie taken by the Johnson columnist”.)

"Selfie" is the clear winner by the traditional standards, a zeitgeisty new word that seems to sum up 2013. But looking at longer lists of word-of-the-year candidates, Johnson was tempted by a different selection process. Nancy Friedman’s various Words of the Year included “metadata”, “bitcoin”, “ephemeral” and “glasshole” as well as “selfie”. One word links them all, even if not a flashy new word.

When Johnson was asked by a German magazine to write a short commentary on the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the lid on America's electronic eavesdropping, I was moved to muse that the German language had no straightforward word for “privacy”. (It has Privatsphäre, or “private sphere”, and Ungestörtheit for the idea of being left in peace, but no word for the abstract notion of privacy itself.)

Under the traditional lazy analysis, “German has no word for ‘privacy’” should mean that the concept is unimportant to Germans, or that they have a hard time understanding it. But the opposite is true. Revelations about NSA spying obsessed Germans throughout the summer, and reached a new fever pitch when it came to light that the Americans had snooped on Angela Merkel’s mobile phone for years. A prominent list of German intellectuals called for Mr Snowden to be given asylum in Germany. Germans are deeply mindful of privacy, a trait that stems from a century when “Gestapo” and “Stasi” became bywords. Despite having no word for it, the Germans could perhaps teach the Americans a thing or two about privacy.

So there you have Johnson’s word of the year. In a world of constant "selfies", when our "metadata" is being hoovered up by spies, when "glassholes" pose a new kind of worry, when new apps like Snapchat make data delete itself ("ephemeral", in the Silicon Valley buzzword), and internet denizens hoard "bitcoins" to keep their buying and selling to themselves, here’s hoping that 2014 sees a little more attention to boring old "privacy".

Update: As Rebekah Otto notes in the comments, Dictionary.com chose "privacy" as Word of the Year a couple of weeks before we did (unbeknownst to your columnist). Their infographic on the year in privacy explains why.

Having been taught privacy in secondary school it grates to read that German doesn't have a word for privacy. "Datenschutz" certainly sums up the concept - as evidenced by "Datenschutzbeauftragte/r" being the equivalent of a Privacy Officer.

Edward Snowden dies of an apparent suicide.
Only handful of friends and family allowed access to the crime site.
No body is produced and cover up is alleged.
Speculation is he faked his death and is living a secret identity.
Or made a deal with the CIA.
Or was whacked a CIA operative.
The CIA denies involvement.
Snowden followers--the Snowmen--deny his death and a cult arises.
Nothing makes his legend grow more than his mysterious ‘alleged’ death/ disappearance.
Che Guevera, Ossama Bin Ladin, and Snowden are reunited
--on an extremist T-Shirt. Sales go viral for a while predominantly in the Mideast.

At Dictionary.com, we also selected privacy as our Word of the Year for 2013. In December, we compiled an infographic that chronicles the year in privacy, including Snowden, Shapchat and dozens of other significant events: http://blog.dictionary.com/infographic-privacy
-Rebekah Otto, Content Manager, Dictionary.com